Beyond the Pale...

Dr. Stephen J. Gould the prime mover of evolutionary theory of his time, recent head of Harvard dept. of paleontology:

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches: the rest is inference however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils...yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection, we view our data as so bad that we never see the process we profess to study." 

Dr. Colin Patterson former senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, private correspondence:  "If I knew of any, fossil or living, (transitional forms) I would certainly have included them...yet Gould and the American museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils... I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."

Dr. Mark Ridley, Oxford zoologist: "In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or  punctuationist (Gould), uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation."

Dennis, I can tell you this--I have always been fascinated by the fossil record, showing as it does incredible life forms all the way through. But when I started, I was only barely aware of the theory of evolution.  I can say during my days of study, I was impartial in regards to origins.  In fact, I found the question of origins irrelevant even to my deepest study of the fossil record.  I knew little of Darwin, and had little use for him, until long after medical school. So I was never a Darwinist, at least not a socially and culturally committed one such as populate our airwaves today. I actually started to study the Bible in 1979, and after that it became an issue; and I immediately became aware of the fatal flaws of Darwinism shortly after that.  Although the seeds were planted by my Shimer college "hard science" professor of chemistry who was also our pre-med adviser. He was a great fan of both Dobzhansky and more so of Michael Polyani.  But he gave me an article called: "Heresy in the Halls of Darwin: Mathematicians Question Evolution."  Not only are there no transitional forms, there is not nearly enough time to transition from one species to another by any proposed or known mechanism. At least nothing under the rubric of purely material causes, which "science" supposedly requires.

got to go, more later perhaps